A year of living dangerously

A year ago this week, Americans turned out to vote in “the most consequential election of our lifetimes,” as they say time after time after time. Only this time, it was all too true.

I voted, as I wrote at the time, for compassion over fear, empathy over ignorance, humanity over mockery, hope over nihilism, progress over regress and decency over vulgarity.

This month, the winning candidate posted an AI generated video of himself flying a plane that dropped great gobs of feces on the heads of his own citizens.

So yeah, my side lost, maybe you’ve heard.

No return

But the unmaking of America proceeding apace ever since seems to remain more of a threat in the national consciousness than a quotidian reality. Somehow, through the various distortion portals across our fractured mediascape, a general notion that we’re merely drifting toward authoritarianism remains in place.

Maybe that’s why the most appositive question sounds so infantile: Are we there yet?

Oh we are there.

The president does as he pleases in 2025 America. He kills suspected drug runners without evidence, puts troops in American cities, terrorizes citizens with immigration raids, rejiggers the justice system to target his enemies, circumvents Congress and the U.S. Constitu-tion and destroys public property, most conspicuously his own public housing.

“There’s a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing, and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress; it was absolutely illegal,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy lamented about Trump’s ballroom blitz on a cable news channel last week. “That visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is. That’s the story with the killings in the Caribbean, as well. The president just doesn’t believe that any law ap-plies to him.”

Murphy went on to state pretty flatly that we are no longer in a functioning democracy, which is achingly apparent, but he also said that it is not too late to save it, which is dubious.

One-man show

Pro-democracy efforts remain in all kinds of forms, and having upwards of five million people turn out for October’s coast-to-coast No Kings rallies is not to be dismissed, a bombardment of Donald Trump’s virtual excrement notwithstanding.

Last week in Illinois, the governor formed an “Illinois Accountability Commission,” to create a public record of the conduct of federal agents and the Trump Administration’s “military style operations” in Chicago.

“None of this is about crime or safety,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement.” Trump administration officials, he said, are acting as though they are “immune from investigation or accountability. They are not.”

Funny, because it looks like they are.

Murphy and Pritzker are accurate about one aspect of this mess, the working theory that the government exists to please Trump and that therefore he’ll do as he pleases.

This theory isn’t exactly new. It was identified and feared across the political spectrum prior to the election of 2016. As Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer-winning conservative columnist, wrote that summer: “(Trump) lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him. (He’s) temperamentally unfit to command the nation.”

Warning signs

Every functioning CHECK DEMOCRACY warning light flashed red for the next four years, all of the fear buttressed by the president’s pathological origin story, painfully laid out in a book by his niece, Mary Trump, who chose carefully the unsubtle subtitle, “How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

By the summer of 2020, it seemed Mary was betting that if Americans knew how ruthlessly the Trumps treated each other, they might hesitate to re-elect a president who brought the same toxic interpersonal dynamics to the White House. She was right. They elected Joe Biden, but a year ago this week, it was evident that too large a portion of the same electorate didn’t read the book.

“He became bolder and more aggressive because he was rarely challenged or held to account by the only person in the world who mattered — his father,” she wrote of the president’s formative years with four siblings. “Fred liked his killer attitude, even if it manifested as bad behavior. Every one of Donald’s transgressions became an audition for his father’s favor, as if he were saying, ‘See Dad, I’m the tough one. I’m the killer.’”

Trump, of course, sued to stop publication, but not because of Mary’s observations as a licensed psychologist. It was because she allegedly violated a contract by providing the New York Times with his returns, a part of the original suit that persists to this day.

Mary’s defense is “an unmistakable imbalance of power.”

Yeah, we know all about it.

Gene Collier is a columnist for the Post-Gazette: gcollier@post-gazette.com and on Bluesky: @genecollier.bsky.social.